In recent times, both Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian churches have developed a deeper understanding for each other's positions, recognizing the substantial agreement while maintaining their respective theological language. Hence, the Monophysite label is avoided when describing the Armenians' or Copts' belief regarding the Nature of Christ. It should be noted that the Armenian Church was not represented by its Supreme Patriarch - the Catholicos during the Council of Chalcedon, because the country was in war at the time, so instead a delegation of clergymen was sent.

In recent times, both Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian churches have developed a deeper understanding for each other's positions, recognizing the substantial agreement while maintaining their respective theological language. Hence, the Monophysite label is avoided when describing the Armenians' or Copts' belief regarding the Nature of Christ. It should be noted that the Armenian Church was not represented by its Supreme Patriarch - the Catholicos during the Council of Chalcedon, because the country was in war at the time, so instead a delegation of clergymen was sent.

The '''Armenian Genocide''' ({{Lang-hy|Հայոց Ցեղասպանութիւն}} ("Hayoc' c'ejaspanut'iwn"), {{Lang-tr|Ermeni Soykırımı}}) — also known as the '''Armenian Holocaust''', '''Great Calamity''' (Մեծ Եղեռն "Mec Ejer'n" ) or the '''Armenian Massacre''' — was the forcible deportation and massacre<ref>New York Times Dispatch. [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F1091FFF3C5412738FDDA10894D8415B868DF1D3 Lord Bryce's report on Armenian atrocities an appalling catalogue of outrage and massacre.]. The New York Times, October 8, 1916.</ref> of hundreds of thousands to over 1.5 million [[Armenians]] during the government of the [[Young Turks]] from 1915 to 1917 in the [[Ottoman Empire]].<ref>"Cultural Cleansing: Who Remembers The Armenians," in Robert Bevan. The Destruction of Memory, Reaction Books, London. 2006, pp. 25–60</ref>

The '''Armenian Genocide''' ({{Lang-hy|Հայոց Ցեղասպանութիւն}} ("Hayoc' c'ejaspanut'iwn"), {{Lang-tr|Ermeni Soykırımı}}) — also known as the '''Armenian Holocaust''', '''Great Calamity''' (Մեծ Եղեռն "Mec Ejer'n" ) or the '''Armenian Massacre''' — was the forcible deportation and massacre<ref>New York Times Dispatch. [http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F1091FFF3C5412738FDDA10894D8415B868DF1D3 Lord Bryce's report on Armenian atrocities an appalling catalogue of outrage and massacre.]. The New York Times, October 8, 1916.</ref> of hundreds of thousands to over 1.5 million [[Armenians]] during the government of the [[Young Turks]] from 1915 to 1917 in the [[Ottoman Empire]].<ref>"Cultural Cleansing: Who Remembers The Armenians," in Robert Bevan. The Destruction of Memory, Reaction Books, London. 2006, pp. 25–60</ref>

Liturgically, the Church has much in common with the Roman Catholic Church. For example, their bishops wear vestments almost identical to those of Western bishops. The Armenian Apostolic Church should not, however, be confused with the Armenian Catholic Church, which is in union with the Roman Catholic Church. They also typically do not use a full iconostasis, but rather a curtain.

History

Christianity in Armenia

Tradition tells us that the Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew first brought Christianity to the land of the Armenians in the first century. However, it would not be for about 200 more years that Armenia would become the first country to adopt Christianity as a state religion, in AD 301, when St. Gregory the Illuminator, a missionary from Caesarea, converted the king of Armenia, Trdat IV, to Christianity. In time, St. Gregory was sent back to Caesarea to be elevated to the episcopate and returned to Armenia as the first Catholicos (or "universal" bishop of an area). Gregory's son, Aristakes, attended the First Ecumenical Council at Nicea in AD 325.

In addition to the obvious spiritual benefits which resulted from the "baptism" of Armenia, this conversion aided in unifying various ethnic groups into a cohesive Armenian identity. The Armenian Church was instrumental in the early missions to neighboring Georgia and Caucasian Albania.

However, the Armenian Orthodox Church argues that this is a wrong description of its position, as it considers Monophysitism, as taught by Eutyches and condemned at Chalcedon, a heresy and only disagrees with the formula defined by that council. The Armenian church instead adheres to the doctrine defined by Cyril of Alexandria, considered as a saint by the Chalcedonian churches as well, who described Christ as being of one incarnate nature, where both divine and human nature are united. To distinguish this from Eutychian and other versions of Monophysitism this position is called miaphysitism.

In recent times, both Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian churches have developed a deeper understanding for each other's positions, recognizing the substantial agreement while maintaining their respective theological language. Hence, the Monophysite label is avoided when describing the Armenians' or Copts' belief regarding the Nature of Christ. It should be noted that the Armenian Church was not represented by its Supreme Patriarch - the Catholicos during the Council of Chalcedon, because the country was in war at the time, so instead a delegation of clergymen was sent.

The Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide (Template:Lang-hy ("Hayoc' c'ejaspanut'iwn"), Template:Lang-tr) — also known as the Armenian Holocaust, Great Calamity (Մեծ Եղեռն "Mec Ejer'n" ) or the Armenian Massacre — was the forcible deportation and massacre[1] of hundreds of thousands to over 1.5 million Armenians during the government of the Young Turks from 1915 to 1917 in the Ottoman Empire.[2]

It is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern, systematic genocides,[3][4] as many Western sources point to the sheer scale of the death toll as evidence for a systematic, organized plan to eliminate the Armenians.[5] The event is also said to be the second-most studied case of genocide after the Nazi Holocaust.[6] To date twenty-two countries have officially recognized it as genocide. The government of the Republic of Turkey rejects the characterization of the events as genocide.[7]

The status of the Ottoman Armenians

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Under the millet system of Ottoman law, Armenians (as dhimmis, along with Greeks, Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities) were subject to laws different from those applied to Muslims.[8] They had separate legal courts, although disputes involving a Muslim fell under sharia-based law. Armenians were exempt from serving in the military and were instead made to pay an exemption tax, the jizya; their testimony in Islamic courts was inadmissible against Muslims; they were not allowed to bear arms, and they had to pay a higher tax,[9] despite being one of the largest minorities in the Ottoman Empire.[10]

Ethnic groups in the Balkans and Asia Minor as of early 20th century (William R. Shepherd, Historical Atlas, 1911).

In 1914, there were an estimated two million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.[11] While the Armenian population in Eastern Anatolia was large and clustered, there were many Armenians in the western part of the Ottoman Empire,[12] particularly in and around Constantinople. It was nearly two decades earlier, though, that the first massacres against Armenians in Anatolia had started; The New York Times quoted a Turkish embassy gazette in 1896 that stated: "It wasn't the Porte that caused the massacres in Armenia, but the Christian propaganda in Asia Minor where their cry, "Down with Islam," initiated the war of the crescent against the cross." [13]

Before the war

Abdul Hamid II's reign, 1876-1909

Sultan Abdul Hamid II suspended the constitution early in his reign, assuming dictatorial powers. As the Ottoman Empire declined, Armenian political resistance stiffened, resulting in several massacres of Armenians throughout Abdul Hamid's reign.[14][15] By the last years of the 19th century, after a series of massacres in 1894 and 1895, the New York Times noted an apparent "policy of extermination directed against the Christians of Asia Minor".[16]

In 1908, the Ottoman Empire came under the control of the Young Turks, a secular movement aiming to restore constitutional and parliamentary rule.[17] The movement was welcomed by religious minorities throughout the Empire. In 1909, as the authority of the nascent Young Turk government splintered, Abdul Hamid II briefly regained his sultanate with a populist appeal to Islamism. 30,000 Armenians perished in the subsequent Adana Massacre.[15] When two U.S.-born missionaries were killed in the 1909 massacres, Ottoman authorities attributed the killings to "Armenians" who killed them as they "were helping to put out a fire in the house of a Turkish widow."[18] This report was later contradicted by an American priest who witnessed the killings, who suggested that the missionaries were killed by "Moslems".[19]

Young Turk leadership

The Young Turk leadership recovered from the Sultan's 1909 countercoup. By this time, however, the Young Turk revolutionaries were already hardened in their distrust and resentment of Ottoman Christians. According to Erik Jan Zürcher of the University of Leiden,

Implementation of the Genocide

Planning

In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. İsmail Enver, Minister of War, launched an unsuccessful military campaign against Russian forces in the Caucasus in hopes of capturing the city of Baku. His forces were routed at the Battle of Sarikamis, and many more of his men froze to death in the retreat.

Returning to Istanbul, Enver largely blamed the Armenians living in the region for actively siding with the Russians.[20] By 1914, Ottoman authorities had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a threat to the country's security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:

Legislation, May 29

In May 1915, Mehmed Talat Pasha requested that the cabinet and grand vizier legalize the deportations of the Armenians of Anatolia. On 29 May1915, the CUP Central Committee passed the Temporary Law of Deportation (Tehcir Law), giving the Ottoman government and military authorization to deport anyone it "sensed" as a threat to national security.[22] Several months later, the Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation was passed, stating that all property, including land, livestock, and homes belonging to Armenians, was to be confiscated by the authorities. Ottoman parliamentary representative Ahmed Riza protested the legislation:

The confiscation of Armenian property and the slaughter of Armenians that ensued upon the law's enactment outraged much of the western world. While the Ottoman Empire's wartime allies offered little protest, a wealth of German and Austrian historical documents has since come to attest to the witnesses' horror at the killings and mass starvation of Armenians.[23][24][25] In the United States, The New York Times reported almost daily on the mass murder of the Armenian people, describing the process as "systematic", "authorized" and "organized by the government." Theodore Roosevelt would later characterize this as "the greatest crime of the war."[26]

Labor battalions

With the passage of Tehcir Law, Enver ordered that all Armenians in the Ottoman forces be disarmed, demobilized and assigned to labor battalions (Turkish: amele taburlari). Many of the Armenian recruits were executed by Ottoman squads known as chetes.[27] Some of the Armenian recruits were utilized as laborers (hamals), though they too would ultimately be executed.[28]

The Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa)

While there was an official 'special organization' founded in December 1911 by the Ottoman government, a second organization that participated in what led to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community was founded by the lttihad ve Terraki.[29] This organization adopted its name in 1913 and functioned like a special forces outfit.[30]

Later in 1914, the Ottoman government influenced the direction the special organization was to take by releasing criminals from central prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed special organization.[31] According to the Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Many other releases followed; in Ankara a few months later, 49 criminals were released from its central prison.citation needed Little by little from the end of 1914 to the beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to form the members of this organization. Later, they were charged to escort the convoys of Armenian deportees.[32] Vehib, commander of the Ottoman Third Army, called those members of the special organization, the “butchers of the human species.” [33]

Process and camps of deportation

The Armenians were marched out to the Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor and the surrounding desert. A good deal of evidence suggests that the Ottoman government did not provide any facilities or supplies to sustain the Armenians during their deportation, nor when they arrived.[34] By August 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people."[35]

Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians not only allowed others to rob, kill, and rape the Armenians, but often participated in these activities themselves.[34] Deprived of their belongings and marched into the desert, hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished.

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It is believed that 25 major concentration camps existed, under the command of Şükrü Kaya, one of the right hands of Talat Pasha.[36] The majority of the camps were situated near modern Iraqi and Syrian frontiers, and some were only temporary transit camps.[36] Others, such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz, are said to have been used only temporarily, for mass graves; these sites were vacated by Fall 1915.[36] Some authors also maintain that the camps Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ra's al-'Ain were built specifically for those who had a life expectancy of a few days.[36]

Though nearly all the camps, including the primary sites, were open air, the remainder of the mass killing in minor camps was not limited to direct killings, but also to mass burning,[37] poisoning[38] and drowning.[39]

Foreign corroboration and reaction

Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the Ottoman Empire's own allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, recorded and documented numerous acts of state-sponsored massacres. Many foreign officials offered to intervene on behalf of the Armenians, including Pope Benedict XV, only to be turned away by Ottoman government officials who claimed they were "retaliating against a pro-Russian fifth column."[40] On May 24, 1915, the Triple Entente warned the Ottoman Empire that "In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres."[41]

The American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE, or "Near East Relief") was a charitable organization established to relieve the suffering of the peoples of the Near East.[42] The organization was championed by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Morgenthau's eyewitness accounts of the mass slaughter of Armenians galvanized much support for ACRNE.[43]

The U.S. mission in the Ottoman Empire

The United States had several consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire, including locations in Edirne, Elazığ, Samsun, İzmir, Trabzon, Van, Constantinople, and another in the Syrian town of Aleppo. The United States was officially a neutral party until it joined the Allies in 1917. As the orders for deportations and massacres were enacted, many consular officials reported back to the ambassador on what they were witnessing. One such report came in September 1915 from the American consul in Kharput, Leslie Davis, who described his discovery of the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians dumped into several ravines near Lake Göeljuk, later referring to it as the "slaughterhouse province".[44]

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Similar reports began to reach Morgenthau from Aleppo and Van, prompting him to raise the issue with Talaat and Enver in person. As he quoted to them the testimonies of the consulate officials, both justified the deportations as necessary to the conduct of the war, suggesting that the complicity of the Armenians of Van with the Russian forces that had overtaken the city justified the persecution of all ethnic Armenians. In his memoirs, Morgenthau later suggested that, "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact…"[45]

In addition to the consulates, there were also several Protestant missionary compounds established in Armenian-populated regions, including Van and Kharput. Many missionaries vividly described the brutal methods used by Ottoman forces and documented numerous instances of atrocities committed against the Christian minority.[46]

The events were reported daily in newspapers and literary journals around the world.[47] Many Americans spoke out against the Genocide, including former president Theodore Roosevelt, rabbi Stephen Wise, William Jennings Bryan, and Alice Stone Blackwell. The American Near East Relief Committee helped donate over $110 million to the Armenians.[48] In the United States and Great Britain, children were regularly reminded to clean their plates while eating and to "remember the starving Armenians".[49]

Allied forces in the Middle East

On the Middle Eastern front, the British military engaged Ottoman forces in southern Syria and Mesopotamia. British diplomat Gertrude Bell filed the following report after hearing the account of a captured Ottoman soldier:

Reacting to numerous eyewitness accounts, British politician Viscount Bryce and historian Arnold J. Toynbee compiled statements from survivors and eyewitnesses from other countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, who similarly attested to the systematized massacring of innocent Armenians by Ottoman government forces. In 1916, they published The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. Although the book has since been criticized as British wartime propaganda to build up sentiment against the Central Powers, Bryce had submitted the work to scholars for verification prior to its publication. University of Oxford Regius Professor Gilbert Murray stated of the tome, "…the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism. Their genuineness is established beyond question."[50] Other professors, including Herbert Fisher
of Sheffield University and former American Bar Association president Moorfield Storey, affirmed the same conclusion.[51]

Winston Churchill described the massacres as an "administrative holocaust" and noted that "the clearance of race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could be… There is no reason to doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions."[52]

The joint Austrian and German mission

As allies during the war, the Imperial German mission in the Ottoman Empire included both military and civilian components. Germany had brokered a deal with the Sublime Porte to commission the building of a railroad stretching from Berlin to the Middle East, called the Baghdad Railway.

Among the most famous persons to document the massacres was German military medic Armin T. Wegner. Wegner defied state censorship in taking hundreds of photographs of Armenians being deported and subsequently starving in northern Syrian camps.[53]

German officers stationed in eastern Turkey disputed the government's assertion that Armenian revolts had broken out, suggesting that the areas were "quiet until the deportations began."[54]

Germany's diplomatic mission was lead by Ambassador Baron Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim (and later Count Paul Wolff Metternich). Like Morgenthau, von Wagenheim received many disturbing messages from consul officials around the Ottoman Empire. From the province of Adana, Consul Eugene Buge reported that the CUP chief had sworn to kill and massacre any Armenians who survived the deportation marches.[55] In June 1915, von Wagenheim sent a cable to Berlin reporting that Talat had admitted the deportations were not "being carried out because of 'military considerations alone.'" One month later, he came to the conclusion that there "no longer was doubt that the Porte was trying to exterminate the Armenian race in the Turkish Empire."[56]

When Wolff-Metternich succeeded von Wagenheim, he continued to dispatch similar cables: "The Committee [CUP] demands the extirpation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the government must yield…. A Committee representative is assigned to each of the provincial administrations…. Turkification means license to expel, to kill or destroy everything that is not Turkish."[57]

German engineers and laborers involved in building the railway also witnessed Armenians being crammed into cattle cars and shipped along the railroad line. Franz Gunther, a representative for Deutsche Bank which was funding the construction of the Baghdad Railway, forwarded photographs to his directors and expressed his frustration at having to remain silent amid such "bestial cruelty".[58] Major General Otto von Lossow, acting military attaché and head of the German Military Plenipotentiary in the Ottoman Empire, spoke to Ottoman intentions in a conference held in Batum in 1918:

Similarly, Major General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein noted that "The Turkish policy of causing starvation is an all too obvious proof… for the Turkish resolve to destroy the Armenians."[59] Another notable figure in the German military camp was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who documented various massacres of Armenians. He sent fifteen reports regarding "deportations and mass killings" to Germany's chancellor in Berlin. His final report noted that fewer than 100,000 Armenians were left alive in the Ottoman Empire; the rest had been exterminated (Template:Lang-de).[60] Scheubner-Richter also detailed the methods of the Ottoman government, noting its use of the Special Organization and other bureaucratized instruments of genocide.

Some Germans openly supported the Ottoman policy against the Armenians, as the German naval attaché in Constantinople said to U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau;

In a genocide conference in 2001, professor Wolfgang Wipperman of the Free University of Berlin introduced documents evidencing that the German High Command was aware of the mass killings at the time but chose not to interfere or speak out.[61]

Russian military

The Russian Empire's response to the bombardment of its Black Sea naval ports was primarily a land campaign through the Caucasus. Early victories against the Ottoman Empire from the winter of 1914 to the spring 1915 saw significant gains of territory, including relieving the Armenian bastion resisting in the city of Van in May 1915. The Russians also reported encountering the bodies of unarmed civilian Armenians in the areas they advanced through.[62] In March 1916, the scenes they saw in the city of Erzerum led the Russians to retaliate against the Ottoman IIIrd Army whom they held responsible for the massacres, destroying it in its entirety.[63]

1919–1920 Military tribunals

Domestic courts-martial

Domestic courts-martial began on 23 November 1918. These courts were designed by Sultan Mehmed VI to punish the Committee of Union and Progress for the Empire's ill-conceived involvement in World War I. The Armenian issue was used as a tool to punish the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress. Most of the documents generated in these courts were later moved to international trials. By January 1919, a report to Sultan Mehmed VI accused over 130 suspects, most of whom were high officials. Mehmed Talat Pasha and Ismail Enver had fled prior to 1919, anticipating the Sultan's wrath. The term Three Pashas generally refers to this prominent triumvirate held accountable for Ottoman Empire involvement in World War I.

The courts-martial officially disbanded the Committee of Union and Progress, which had actively ruled the Ottoman Empire for ten years. All the assets of the organization were transferred to the treasury, and the assets of those found guilty were moved to "teceddüt firkasi". According to verdicts handed down by the court, all members except for the Three Pashas were transferred to jails in Bekiraga, then moved to Malta. The Three Pashas were found guilty in absentia. The courts-martial blamed the members of Ittihat Terakki for pursuing a war that did not fit into the notion of Millet.

International trials

These Ottoman politicians, generals, and intellectuals were deported to Malta, where they were held for some three years, while searches were made of archives in Istanbul, London, Paris and Washington to investigate their actions.[64]

Article 230 of the Treaty of Sèvres required the Ottoman Empire "hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914."

At the trials in Istanbul in 1919 many of those responsible for the genocide were sentenced to death in absentia, after having escaped trial in 1918. The military court established the will of the Committee of Union and Progress to eliminate the Armenians physically, via its special organization. The 1919 pronouncement reads as follows:

Armenian deaths, 1914 to 1918

While there is no consensus as to how many Armenians lost their lives during the Armenian Genocide, there is general agreement among western scholars that over 500,000 Armenians perished between 1914 and 1918. Estimates vary between 300,000 (per the modern Turkish state) to 1,500,000 (per modern Armenia,[65] Argentina,[66] and other states). Encyclopædia Britannica references the research of Arnold J. Toynbee, an intelligence officer of the British Foreign Office, who estimated that 600,000 Armenians "died or were massacred during deportation" in the years 1915-1916 alone.[67]

Influence of the Armenian Genocide on Adolf Hitler

The Armenian Genocide is often speculated to have influenced Adolf Hitler, owing to his various references to the Ottoman killings of Armenians.[68] The extent of Hitler's knowledge of the Armenian Genocide is unclear, though he did refer to their destruction several times.[69] The most notable quote attributed to Hitler on the Armenians is excerpted from an August 1939 military conference, prior to the invasion of Poland:

There are numerous accounts of Hitler speaking in regards to the Armenians, with at least two similar versions of the 1939 speech coming from the German High Command archives. In 1931, for example, two years prior to his ascension as Germany's leader, Hitler noted in an interview that "everywhere people are awaiting a new world order. We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy… remember the extermination of the Armenians."[70] In 1943, during the height of his attempts to exterminate the Jews in Europe, Hitler demanded of Hungarian regent Admiral Miklós Horthy that he deport the Jews from the country: "Nations which did not get rid of the Jews perished. One of the most famous examples of this was the downfall of a people who were so proud — the Persians, who now lead a pitiful existence as Armenians."[71]

Academic views

Hebrew University scholar Yehuda Bauer suggests of the Armenian Genocide, "This is the closest parallel to the Holocaust."[72] He nonetheless distinguishes several key differences between the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, particularly in regards to motivation:

Bauer has also suggested that the Armenian Genocide is best understood, not as having begun in 1915, but rather as "an ongoing genocide, from 1896, through 1908/9, through World War I and right up to 1923."[73]Lucy Dawidowicz also alludes to these earlier massacres as at least as significant as WWI era events:

While some consider denial to be a form of hate speech or politically-minded historical revisionism,[8] a small minority of western academics in the field of Ottoman history have expressed doubts as to the genocidal character of the events.[80][81][82] While these dissenting opinions are far more common among residents of modern Turkey, some academics have established reputations for having adopted the viewpoint of the Turkish state. Justin A. McCarthy of the University of Louisville, for instance, has regularly contended that the events do not constitute genocide; in 1998, the government of Turkey awarded him with the Order of Merit for his efforts.[83]

The most important counterpoint may be that of British scholar Bernard Lewis. While he had once written of "the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished",[84] he later came to believe that the term "genocide" was distinctly inaccurate, because the "tremendous massacres"[85] were not "a deliberate preconceived decision of the Turkish government."[86] This opinion has been joined by Guenter Lewy.[87]

While academic opinions within the modern Republic of Turkey often seem to be at odds with international consensus, this may stem from the fact that it remains illegal to speak of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey. Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk faced harassment and criminal prosecution for stating that "a million Armenians were killed in these lands".[88][89]

Similarly, Hrant Dink, the ethnic Armenian chief editor of the Agos newspaper in Turkey, was prosecuted by the Turkish state three times for "denigrating Turkishness", for his having criticized the Turkish state's denial of the Armenian Genocide.[90] In 2007, he was gunned down by a Turkish nationalist.[91] Leaked photographs of the assassin apparently being revered as a national hero while in police custody, posing in front of the Turkish flag with grinning policemen,[92] gave the academic community still more pause in regards to engaging the Armenian issue.[93]

According to the scholarship of Bat Ye'or, "The genocide of the Armenians was a jihad."[94] Ye'or contends that the Islamic concepts of dhimmitude and jihad were among the "principles and values" that led to the Armenian Genocide.[95]

The Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide

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The Republic of Turkey's formal stance is that the deaths of Armenians during the "relocation" or "deportation" cannot aptly be deemed "genocide." This point has been contended with a plethora of diverging justifications: that the killings were not deliberate or were not governmentally orchestrated, that the killings were justified because Armenians posed a Russian-sympathizing threat as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various characterizations recalling marauding "Armenian gangs."[96][97][98] Some suggestions seek to invalidate the genocide on semantic or anachronistic grounds (the word "genocide" was not coined until 1943).

The website of the Turkish General Staff also offers many of its own publications intended to bolster denial of the Armenian Genocide. One such example defines the Armenians as "an incapable, parasite and greedy nation that can live only at another nation's expense."[100]

Turkish governmental sources have asserted that the historically-demonstrated "tolerance of Turkish people"[101] itself renders the Armenian Genocide an impossibility. One military document leverages 11th century history to disprove the Armenian Genocide: "It was the Seljuk Turks who saved the Armenians that came under the Turkish domination in 1071 from the Byzantine persecution and granted them the right to live as a man should."[101] A Der Spiegel article addressed this modern Turkish conception of history thus:

Public prosecutors have utilized Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code prohibiting "insulting Turkishness" to silence some Turkish intellectuals who spoke of atrocities endured by Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.[102] Turkish state officials say that no one is currently incarcerated for expressing their ideas, and that the law may soon be amended.[103] The modern Turkish government continues to protest the formal recognition of the genocide by other countries.

Open University of Israel scholar Yair Auron, in his The Banality of Denial, has addressed the various means employed by the Turkish government to obscure the reality of the Armenian Genocide:

Recognition of the Armenian Genocide

Responding to Turkish state denials of the Armenian Genocide, many activists among Armenian Diaspora communities have pushed for formal recognition from various governments around the world. Twenty-two countries, the Welsh Assembly,[104] and 40 of the U.S. states, have adopted formal resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide as a bona fide historical event.

In 2006 the French parliament has adopted a bill making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide [105].

Turkish-Armenian intellectual Hrant Dink (who recognized the Genocide) was often critical of these recognition campaigns as being unhelpful.citation needed

On October 10, 2007, prior to a vote by the United States House of Representatives that would condemn the events formally as genocide, Rice was joined by the other eight living U.S. Secretaries of State in calling for the measure to be defeated, in order to protect American regional interests and maintain basing rights in Turkey for American efforts in Iraq. Turkey recalled its ambassador to the United States, in an apparent reaction to the upcoming vote in the House of Representatives.[107]

Commemoration

The memorial at Tsitsernakaberd

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In 1965, the 50th anniversary of the genocide, a 24-hour mass protest was initiated in Yerevan demanding recognition of the Armenian Genocide by Soviet authorities. The memorial was completed two years later, at Tsitsernakaberd above the Hrazdan gorge in Yerevan. The 44 meter stele symbolizes the national rebirth of Armenians. 12 slabs are positioned in a circle, representing 12 lost provinces in present day Turkey. At the center of the circle there is an eternal flame.

Each April 24th, hundreds of thousands of people walk to the genocide monument and lay flowers around the eternal flame.

Art

The earliest example of the Armenian genocide on art was a medal issued in St. Petersburg, signifying Russian sympathy for Armenian suffering. It was struck in 1915, as the massacres and deportations were still raging. Since then, dozens of medals in different countries have been commissioned to commemorate the event.[110]

Several eyewitness accounts of the events were published, notably those of Swedish missionary Alma Johansson and U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. German medic Armin Wegner wrote several books about the events he witnessed while stationed in the Ottoman Empire. Years later, having returned to Germany, Wegner was imprisoned for opposing Nazism,[111] and his books were subjected to Nazi book burnings.[112] Nonetheless, the most famous piece of literature concerning the Armenian Genocide is Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Published in 1933, Werfel's work became a best-seller.

Kurt Vonnegut's 1988 novel Bluebeard features the Armenian Genocide as an underlying theme. Other novels incorporating the Armenian Genocide include Louis de Berniéres' Birds without Wings, Edgar Hilsenrath's German-language The Fairytale of the Last Thought, and Stefan Żeromski's 1925 The Spring to Come. A story in Edward Saint-Ivan's 2006 anthology "The Black Knight's God" includes a fictional survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

The first film about the Armenian Genocide appeared in 1919, a Hollywood production entitled Ravished Armenia. It resonated with acclaimed director Atom Egoyan, influencing his 2002 Ararat. There are also references in Elia Kazan's America, America or Henri Verneuil's Mayrig. At the Berlin Film Festival of 2007 Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani presented another film about the events, based on Antonia Arslan's book, La Masseria Delle Allodole (The Farm of the Larks).[113] Richard Kalinoski's play, Beast on the Moon, is about two Armenian Genocide survivors.

The works of Arshile Gorky, an Armenian expatriate whose mother starved to death in the genocide, were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss of the period.[114] Gorky was a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism.

American composer and singer Daniel Decker has achieved critical acclaim for his collaborations with Armenian composer Ara Gevorgian. The song "Adana", named for the province of a 1909 pogrom of the Armenian people, tells the story of the Armenian Genocide. "Adana" has been translated into 17 languages and recorded by singers around the world.[116]

The band System of a Down, composed of four descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors, has promoted awareness of the Armenian Genocide, through its lyrics and concerts.[117]

In late 2003, Diamanda Galás released the album "Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead," an 80-minute memorial tribute to the Armenian, Greek, Assyrian and Hellenic victims of the genocide in Turkey. "The performance is an angry meditation on genocide and the politically cooperative denial of it, in particular the Turkish and American denial of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides from 1914 to 1923".[118]

↑Eitan Belkind was a Nili member, who infiltrated the Ottoman army as an official. He was assigned to the headquarters of Camal Pasha. He claims to have witnessed the burning of 5,000 Armenians, quoted in Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide. New Brunswick, N.J., 2000, pp. 181, 183. Lt. Hasan Maruf, of the Ottoman army, describes how a population of a village were taken all together, and then burned. See, British Foreign Office 371/2781/264888, Appendices B., p. 6). Also, the Commander of the Third Army, Vehib's 12 pages affidavit, which was dated December 5, 1918, presented in the Trabzon trial series (March 29, 1919) included in the Key Indictment(published in Takvimi Vekayi, No. 3540, May 5, 1919), report such a mass burning of the population of an entire village near Mus. S. S. McClure write in his work, Obstacles to Peace, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917. pp. 400–1, that in Bitlis, Mus and Sassoun, The shortest method for disposing of the women and children concentrated in tile various camps was to burn them. And also that, Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these scenes were horrified and maddened at the remembering the sight. They told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the air for many days after. The Germans, Ottoman allies, also witnessed the way Armenians were burned according to the Israeli historian, Bat Ye’or, who writes: The Germans, allies of the Turks in the First World War, …saw how civil populations were shut up in churches and burned, or gathered en masse in camps, tortured to death, and reduced to ashes,… (See: B. Ye'or, The Dhimmi. The Jews and Christians under Islam, Trans. from the French by D. Maisel P. Fenton and D. Liftman, Cranbury, N.J.: Frairleigh Dickinson University, 1985. p. 95)

↑During the Trabzon trial series, of the Martial court (from the sittings between March 26 and Mat 17, 1919), the Trabzons Health Services Inspector Dr. Ziya Fuad wrote in a report that Dr. Saib, caused the death of children with the injection of morphine, the information was allegedly provided by two physicians (Drs. Ragib and Vehib), both Dr. Saib colleagues at Trabzons Red Crescent hospital, where those atrocities were said to have been committed. (See: Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Turkish Military Tribunal’s Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series, Genocide Study Project, H. F. Guggenheim Foundation, published in The Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 1997). Dr. Ziya Fuad, and Dr. Adnan, public health services director of Trabzon, submitted affidavits, reporting a cases, in which, two school buildings were used to organize children and then sent them on the mezzanine, to kill them with a toxic gas equipment. This case was presented during the Session 3, p.m., 1 April 1919, also published in the Constantinople newspaper Renaissance, 27 April 1919 (for more information, see: Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, in The Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 2 (1986): 169–192). The Ottoman surgeon, Dr. Haydar Cemal wrote in Türkce Istanbul, No. 45, 23 December 1918, also published in Renaissance, 26 December 1918, that on the order of the Chief Sanitation Office of the IIIrd Army in January 1916, when the spread of typhus was an acute problem, innocent Armenians slated for deportation at Erzican were inoculated with the blood of typhoid fever patients without rendering that blood ‘inactive’. Jeremy Hugh Baron writes : Individual doctors were directly involved in the massacres, having poisoned infants, killed children and issued false certificates of death from natural causes. Nazim's brother-in-law Dr. Tevfik Rushdu, Inspector-General of Health Services, organized the disposal of Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over six months; he became foreign secretary from 1925 to 1938. (See: Jeremy Hugh Baron, Genocidal Doctors, publish in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, November, 1999, 92, pp. 590–3). The psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, writes in a parenthesis when introducing the crimes of NAZI doctors in his book Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, (1986) p. xii: (Perhaps Turkish doctors, in their participation in the genocide against the Armenians, come closest, as I shall later suggest). and drowning.

↑Oscar S. Heizer, the American consul at Trabzon, reports: This plan did not suit Nail Bey…. Many of the children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea and thrown overboard. (See: U.S. National Archives. R.G. 59. 867. 4016/411. April 11, 1919 report.) The Italian consul of Trabzon in 1915, Giacomo Gorrini, writes: I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea. (See: Toronto Globe, August 26, 1915) Hoffman Philip, the American Charge at Constantinople chargé d'affairs, writes: Boat loads sent from Zor down the river arrived at Ana, one thirty miles away, with three fifths of passengers missing. (Cipher telegram, July 12, 1916. U.S. National Archives, R.G. 59.867.48/356.) The Trabzon trials reported Armenians having been drown in the Black Sea. (Takvimi Vekdyi, No. 3616, August 6, 1919, p. 2.)

↑In his memoirs, Morgenthau noted "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact…. I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."

Leadership

The hierarch of the Armenian Church is the Catholicos of Armenia. The current Catholicos is Garegin II, who resides in the city of Echmiadzin, west of Yerevan. However, a minority of the church has recognized instead the Catholicos of Cilicia, who resides in Antilyas in Lebanon, as a result of a dispute that emerged while Armenia was under Communist rule.